Leather Wings (6 page)

Rex controls himself and advises instead: “Don’t give in to it, Esther. We have to be all right for Jania. She could be back any minute. I thought you’d be home sooner. Oh, come here.”

They hang on to one another, patting each other into shape, a couple despite all. Then she pulls away from him, remembering where she has been, afraid he might smell the guilt on her. In fact they used a condom. Safe sex. The irony of it edges under her skin and makes her scalp prickle with something like shame.

I
T WAS A
chance thing, one of those lucky accidents, that I happened to drive past the pocket handkerchief park and glance sideways. I wasn’t cruising, I was going at a reasonable bat, on my way home, in fact, but I couldn’t miss the purple pants and Disney shirt — they’d been stamped on my eyeballs since that time in the garden, it was like an acid flashback when I looked out of the car window and there she was. I wasn’t quite sure. I’ve never seen her in this park before, it isn’t a real park, no trees or hilly bits to hide in, just a level oblong with swings and seesaw and stuff. A tyre hanging from a frame, a sandpit. The play area, they call it. No reason for a man to be there without kids in tow. Naturally, I take the occasional glance sideways and this time, bingo: purple pants and Disney shirt. I skidded the car to a stop further on, like in a cops and robbers chase, hoping I wasn’t making a spectacle of myself. You have to assume there’s always someone watching, watching for you to make a mistake, even if there’s no one about. I turned the car and cruised back more slowly, checking that I’d got it right.

She was sitting inside the bars that divide up the merry-go-round like a cake, inside one of these pieces of cake with her little bottom wedged into the corner, laughing out loud while the babysitter twirled her faster and faster. Not too fast for me to be sure it was her, my little pixie. I parked along the road and walked back, not forgetting my briefcase, it looked better.

Jania sat up and called out to the big girl, “Slow it — stop!”

The big girl was called Sharon. Jania introduced me as if I was an old family friend, which in a way you could say I am. Your friend, the Rawleigh’s man. I’ve called at Sharon’s house. Her mum doesn’t go out to work, she sits at home waiting for the postman and the Rawleigh’s man, she’s not very well. I said I remembered her. We had a little conversation about vanilla essence and home-made milkshakes.

There was no one else in the play area, just us. People did walk by on the street, with briefcases and shopping bags, on
their way home from work or the shops. It was perfectly safe, you could tell Sharon felt safe enough, watched over by all these neighbours, it was okay to talk to the Rawleigh’s man. I began to relax.

“Isn’t it getting near your tea time?” I asked Jania. With any luck I could offer to drive them home, I didn’t think at that point about the chance of letting Sharon off first, it didn’t occur to me, honestly. Anyway, I didn’t offer then. Jania started to tell me about the toy city — she called it her “bedroom city” because that’s where she’d built it. She needs a car, she says, for her Rawleigh’s man. She actually said that — she’s got a doll Rawleigh’s man, it made me feel quite strange, light headed.

“Esther can’t hoover under my bed, she fusses but she says it keeps me quiet.”

I say again that it must be getting near her tea time. “I have to go for my tea soon, don’t you, Sharon?”

Sharon looks at her watch. “Soon.”

“He wanted rid of me,” Jania says, quite cheerfully it seems, used to it I expect.

“Her Grandad had some business,” Sharon explains, rather sharply I thought, making excuses where none were due, I bet.

I’d said I was leaving for my tea so I had to go. It would have looked funny not to. I had this stretchy feeling, which I’ve had on other occasions, terrible but lovely too: a feeling in my hands and arms as if they want to stretch out and touch, like there’s strings attached and something tugging, tugging. Oh, Christ! I was so lucky that afternoon. It’s my second bit of luck. As if someone is giving me permission to be near her. I need to be close to her, she needs a person who truly cares about her to watch over her, protect her, don’t laugh at me, I’m serious. How much real affection do you think she gets from those two selfish wankers? My father would have said “
me
generation” — it was one of his smart swear words, well two words I suppose. What about Jania’s daddy, dumping the kid so he can get on with his life, pick up women, you can bet on it, why go back to school if you’re not going to take advantage? No mention of Mummy. Dead or buggered off, it comes to the same thing. She has that look of an orphan, I’m not
being sentimental, I’m not one of those who sit in front of a television, sniffing. The thing is she looks — separate. I might have given the wrong impression when I said that stuff about her fine skin, her soft hair. That’s right, but she doesn’t have a cute round face like the other kids who’ve got me in trouble (with myself, don’t worry, not with the law, I’m not a fool.) No, Jania has a pointy face and big eyes, like a little pixie, with a fringe of white hair. She looks like no one else I’ve ever known, I don’t know why she makes me feel — the eyes have a lot to do with it I expect, and the way she shrugs her shoulders at you. She does this when she says hello, as if her body is saying hello with the rest of her, a bit of a wriggle — shyness is there too — I can’t tell you what that does to a man. I’ve always liked shyness, modesty. A shy body and a forward talker, a shy talker and a forward body, both of these work for me but there has to be shy in it somewhere, I guess I’m a shy man. The shy Rawleigh’s man — that’s a contradiction, isn’t it? That’s me. Anyway, Jania likes me. She’s made a doll of me.

E
STHER IS IN
trouble with Donald. She has done just what she promised him she would never do, mislaid some papers, at home, where they had no right to be. It was days after she smuggled the two box files back into the office that she discovered the loss and now suddenly it is important that she produce the folder instantly.

“I’ll go home and look,” she whispers, keeping her eyes down and aware that people could be watching her through the glass.

“No you won’t, Mr Finn’s waiting on that other report. I’ll have to think of something to stall them downstairs. Oh, God, Esther, I don’t need this!”

Esther’s eyes start to water. She hasn’t yet had a chance to talk to Donald about the HIV scare concerning her grandchild. She prefers to think of it as a scare, until they take Jania to have the tests done. It might not be real. But the possibility of tragedy haunts her and she “doesn’t need this” any more than Donald. She can’t believe he doesn’t see the skull and cross-bones in her eyes, the scythe of the grim reaper swinging in her pupils, and accuses him soundlessly of insensitivity. Is he blind? He must see something is wrong. Does he think she looks this way — the grey bags snuggled on her cheek bones — simply because of his possible impending departure? A typical smug male assumption. Of course, she will miss him — horribly — but of course she will survive. Today she feels quite sure of this. There are worse things.

Death is all very well in its proper order, but to have it living under your own roof, inhabiting an innocent child, a child you were calling a nuisance two days ago! She feels sick in her stomach; she hasn’t been able to eat since the letter arrived. It feels like when she was hauled up in front of the headmistress that time for taking home school property. Guilt. “Yes Mrs P - P - Patrick.” That was when she was still afflicted with her “nervous” stammer. “Don’t draw attention to it,” she’d overheard her mother whisper. “It’s just nerves.” At
school when they had group reading the other girls in her corner would mimick her. Perhaps her stammer will come back now with all this going on — and serve her right. Guilt. As if she could be held responsible for the defection of a foreign hospital, or more to the point, held responsible for not loving the child enough; Esther feels superstitiously that love can immunise against disaster. Is this what is wrong with Rex’s heart? A low love count? Esther’s fault as well? She nearly didn’t come in to work today, wishes she hadn’t. She takes a breath and somewhere in the middle of it a paroxysm of despair chokes her, shockingly the water in her eyes overflows. She turns her back on the glass partition and scrabbles in her skirt pocket for a tissue, which isn’t there.

“For God’s sake!” He kicks a chair so that it faces away from the window. “Sit down and look as if we’re doing something useful. Here.”

He has tissues in his desk. She knows this, but they are for the younger, sillier staff, not his middle-aged mistress. He hands her a tissue and a computer printout with the same hand, as a covering device; positions himself alongside her chair and leans in with his ballpoint to indicate some fictional point of interest on the printout. He is good at deception. She shouldn’t be surprised at this, having taught him much of it herself, but it does occur to her to wonder if he has ever practised it against her.

“All right?”

“It’s not you,” she explains, still nasal with tears, but dry eyed now. “We had some bad news from Canada. I can’t tell you here. I wasn’t crying at you.”

“Okay. Well, I’m sorry to hurry you, Es, but there really is a rush on. Don’t worry.”

He is watching her dab fingers at her eyes. “You look fine. I’ll think of something to stall Finny, like I said. But find that folder, love — okay?”

“I will.”

She sits at her desk and dozes in front of a spreadsheet. This is no time to slide off to sleep, but she so nearly does. Her mind invents a nightmare in which Jania has cut up the file, given it doors and windows and moved in a family of dolls
fashioned from Fimo. Next time she will take nothing home until it has been saved on to the computer — floppies too — and certainly nothing with an original signature. At least three o’clock is nearly upon her, thank God. But she will be going home to face Jania whose presence weighs on her now with quite a different sort of pressure, who can’t be put aside any longer like a library book she doesn’t find engrossing enough. Now Esther can scarcely look at the little girl without a sting of apprehension and sorrow. Remorse too. It is as if Prue has come back into their lives again, scowling at Esther, her mother, crooning at Jania, her child, demanding action. Even Martin, the child’s father, has made his voice echo in the house, repeating over and over that phrase in the letter she doesn’t want to think about.

They have to think about it. Rex has organised himself to ring the hospital and set up tests. Suddenly, in this situation he is the strong one, which is a surprise. He wants to know the worst, can’t wait. Of course, Esther will recover, she will be strong again soon and tell everyone if they are doing it wrong or too slowly. She has worked too hard at being efficient, at managing, to let it all slip now. How long before a result can be expected? She thinks she remembers hearing it was two weeks. She’ll wait no longer. It seems an awfully long time. You could die of fright in two weeks. At least she knows enough about AIDS to feel quite secure about her own and Rex’s health. They don’t make a habit of sharing toothbrushes or floss. Will she have to tell the school? Will Jania have to know? If she develops AIDS tomorrow, how long will she have? There are two kinds of virus, Esther saw this in the paper recently, one is a lot worse than the other. Would Jania have lived after the accident anyway without the blood transfusion? How many cases of infection have been reported from that hospital? Why couldn’t she have had that accident closer to a decent hospital?

Last night they had tried to ring Martin, but he wasn’t answering his telephone. Perhaps he has deliberately gone out, away. He has typically chosen the coward’s way of conveying the poisonous news, what you could call a poison pen letter. He claims to be checking out the possibility of
flying to New Zealand, but Rex and Esther know Martin and will believe this only when he arrives on their doorstep.

It is illogical but she can’t quite put it out of her head that Martin is in some way responsible for the danger threatening his daughter now. If he had dressed differently, washed his hair more often, been a plump respectable assistant bank manager, would she have felt like this? She isn’t being fair, she certainly isn’t being scientific. It is not Martin’s blood that might have contaminated his daughter’s. But.

She guessed Martin was trouble when he came over that first time, for the wedding, with his hair in a pony tail. He dressed like a Mexican rather than a Canadian; a fine line of blond moustache above all those long teeth, and his thin yellow hair trapped in that greasy ribbon. Black trousers, too narrow, and then the boots. He wasn’t as tall as he wanted to be, obviously, or he wouldn’t have needed those expensive tooled boots with heels. Esther has nothing against unconventional dressers, nor against long hair on a man, although it seems pathetically dated, surely? She thinks she could have forgiven him his style of dress if he had had a better effect on Prue. She and Rex couldn’t stand the way Prue gazed at this creature, how she kowtowed to him, giggled at his unfunny puns. It was dreadful. She can’t remember one conversation with Martin that wasn’t larded with smart-aleck humour; how could you believe there was a real person living in there? Even at the funeral and on the days that followed he mimicked a wind-up wooden doll. When the jokes had fallen off his face it was as if he had no other expressions available. His mouth moved, his thin moustache went up and down as he spoke, but where was the real grief? Sometimes he wiped his cupped hand from his nose down over his chin, perhaps there was grief under his hand, who knows? At other times his big round eyes stared at you while you were talking, stared so hard you knew you weren’t really there in his line of vision at all.

“Perhaps he doesn’t trust us?” Rex had asked Esther once.

“Trust
us
!” Esther was shocked. “He’s a con man!”

He is the father of their grandchild, Prue’s daughter. She looks like him, his genes must be in there somewhere, warring
with Prue’s genes. Or are Prue’s genes giggling and backing off while his genes are punning wildly in Jania’s bloodstream. This is a terrible way to be thinking about Jania. Esther reminds herself of how her spirits lifted in a curious fashion when she had caught sight of the child newly arrived at Auckland airport, shepherded by a woman flight attendant. Jania’s little face looking out expectantly from under her fringe and lifting up at the sight of Esther and Rex at the barrier — it had given Esther an unexpected jolt, as if she were almost pleased at the prospect of two years
in loco parentis.
She wanted at that moment, clumsily hugging her, to do her best for Jania, give her a happy time she could take back to Canada with her in her suitcase. Of course, reality struck in a very short time, once Jania was installed in the house and her high voice ringing out. She has this very high, piercing tone, nothing like Prue’s sweet childish voice.